It is a rare thing, indeed, when we are able to see
some quick, tangible accomplishment from something that we have written.
Such a moment may have arrived. Professor
Robert W. Bednarzik of the Georgetown School of Public Policy has begun an online petition to save
the International Labor Comparisons program of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
the scorekeeper of international labor data from a U.S. perspective.
Readers of this page may recall that we scooped the journalistic world when we
sounded the tocsin on February 6 with “Kill the Messenger?”

But letting the press tell us and our elected
officials what to think is now part of an era that is on its way out.
Neither we nor they need to wait for the journalists. You don’t even have
to believe me, and you don’t have to believe Robert Bednarzik. Virtually
every assertion of fact that I make in the original article is supported by a
link to the actual government documents being described. One astute
reader followed the links and noticed that, while I was right to say that the
United States had the greatest decline in manufacturing employment among 17
countries in 2008, the correct percentage was 3.4 percent rather than
3.9. That error has now been corrected. I was looking at the table
for manufacturing hours worked instead of the one for manufacturing employment,
which comes right after it. When we compare the two tables we see that
the more-often-cited employment numbers actually understate the problem in the
United States. Both in 2007-2008 and over the longer 2000-2008 period,
U.S. hours worked in manufacturing declined at an even greater rate than did employment.

But back to the petition, here’s how it reads:

The International Labor Comparisons Program of the
Bureau of Labor Statistics is proposed for elimination in the
President's FY-2011 budget. For just $2 million annually and with 50 years of
experience, the BLS International Labor Comparisons Program produces timely,
high-quality international comparisons of labor force, productivity, hourly
compensation, and prices for many industrialized countries. The program
has pioneered in the development of comparative data for emerging
economies, notably China and Brazil and with work in progress on India and
others. This program provides the only data available that ensure
comparisons are "apples to apples" and not "apples to oranges”;
that is, they permit valid comparisons of the U.S. labor market with labor
markets abroad and reliable assessments of U.S. manufacturing
competitiveness.

To preserve these widely used and vital
comparisons in our increasingly global economy, the undersigned appeal to the
Congress to restore funding for the BLS Program of International Labor
Comparisons.

As of this writing, all but one of the signers are
from academia, but don’t let that put you off. Professors—even professors of
economics—are not always wrong. To go ahead and sign the petition, you
just have to believe that it is generally better to know more than to know less
when it comes to important economic information, and you probably should have
at least a tiny bit of belief left in the workings of our democracy.